Invisible Slaves

Overview

In Invisible Slaves, W. Kurt Hauser discusses slavery around the world, with research and firsthand stories that reframe slavery as a modern-day crisis, not a historical phenomenon or third-world issue. Identifying four types of slavery—chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, and sex slavery—he examines the efforts and failures of governments to address them. He explores the political, economic, geographic, and cultural factors that shape slavery today, illustrating the tragic human toll with individual stories. Country by country, the author illuminates the harsh realities of modern-day slavery. He explores slavery's effects on victims, including violence, isolation, humiliation, and the master-slave relationship, and discusses the methods traffickers use to lure the vulnerable, especially children, into slavery. He assesses nations based on their levels of slavery and efforts to combat the problem, citing the rankings of the United States' Trafficking Victims Protection Act. He concludes with an appeal to governments and ordinary citizens alike to meet this humanitarian crisis with awareness and action.

Reviews

1. This is a deeply moving book. Factual and calm, Kurt Hauser issues a carefully documented, urgent wake-up call. Slavery remains shockingly pervasive around the world in the twenty-first century, even in Western countries. With this book, Hauser helps slavery's invisible victims to be heard. —Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founder of the AHA Foundation. 2. Invisible Slavery recounts in readable prose and riveting detail the pervasiveness of contemporary slavery, found in developing lands and in our Facebook world. This tour d'horizon blends numerical data with tragic vignettes of individuals swallowed up in shadowy and wicked enslavement. By writing this unflinching account Kurt Hauser opens our consciousness, our minds, and our hearts to a present-day evil too often ignored. —Thomas Henriksen, Hoover Institution senior fellow emeritus

Author Biography

W. Kurt Hauser received BA and MBA degrees from Stanford University. He was the head of an investment management firm for most of his career. As an economist his work has been published in many news media including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Investors Business Daily, among others. He is the author of Taxation and Economic Performance (Hoover Press, 1996); his research on the relationship among tax rates, federal government revenues, and economic growth has become known as Hauser's Law. He is a past chairman of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. For the past decade he has devoted his time to researching the origin, evolution, development, and ubiquity of global slavery.